* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #856 / Revived #076 on 2024 09 11 *

I like the colour version much more but to highlight the rainbow more, maybe a combination of the 2 images?

I used a black to white gradient on a layer mask with the 2 images stacked on top of each other.

This is the kind of thing I'm writing about in my far from finished piece on photography C&C.
I agree with Dan. Photography isn't one thing. If a photographer's aim is to try to produce an image as seen by the human eye, that's fine. It's an entirely OK aim for a photographer to have and they make their photographs accordingly.
However, there are many other possibilities when making photographic process images.
Then there is what the viewer brings to the experience. A shown image is a communication that triggers responses. At this point it is relevant to consider most of the factors in our response to art in general.

Very nice photo and back story.

For me though, the roof blends too much into the background because they both have similar lightness. I think more contrast between the roof and background help to hut stand out more overall.

Here I just darkened the background a bit around the edge of the roof and brought out a bit more texture and detail in the walls timber to also help the hut stand out more.

Anyway, as usual, just some food for thought.

Thanks Chris. We figure it had some important purpose for the farm business, close to the house. My grandfather's "office"? A storage area with better accessibility to the main road? Park of the dairy operation? Dunno. Still a mystery.

Thanks for thinking with me Mike! The roof is open to the rafters but with a small planked area over about 1/3 of the west side. Extra cedar shakes and some other old farm implements were stored there when I got it. The house and this outbuilding have the same high pitch pyramidal roof, though snowfall has always been rare and light here. It supposedly allows hot air to rise from living and work areas during hot summers. We know the underground section was used as a storm cellar, but the elaborate nature of the layout wasn't necessary for just that purpose, so there must have been another reason. That whole underground section became unstable in the 1950s and was sealed off, so no chance to explore it. My mother remembered it and some of the vaulting was visible when another portion of the tunnel collapsed when I was a young adult. Moonshining? Yeah. But my grandfather kept the still on the back 40, He and two neighbors and a couple of their sharecroppers tended it back there, and if the Government Men were in the area, they moved it across the fenceline onto the property of a man they didn't get along with. And the doorway is the white protrusion barely visible on the right side. The vaulting started there, and runs into the external wall of the bedroom. I salvaged some of the bricksand made a brick walkway to mark the lines of the old vaulting.

Thanks. Yours are subtle improvements that I think make it a better photo!

Thank you minniev.

I mainly dodged and burned using a separate layer in Photoshop Elements with some additional brightening of the top left window panel in the door.

Thanks Chris,
Initially the 2nd was my favourite but that one has grown on me.

Thanks Mike,
Exposures can be hard to nail as I might be capturing something else and then see a bird coming along the lake with very little time to change anything other than get focus on a similarly distanced object. Still learning pp...
I purposefully cropped them all the same size and ordered them to give the sense of climbing. Not the first series I have shown where they were actually taken in reverse order!

Thanks minniev,
They are more graceful than many of the other birds that seem to be on a mission to escape the human predator.photographer... I looked up the great blue. Quite some differences and I've seen a few photos of other species with a lot of variation too. These ones are on my bucketlist to fill the frame a bit more and hopefully try for some finer detail.

The sky is a beautiful gold, but could also be seen as the glow from a burning city, and the crow is often seen as a negative symbol, even if it has a certain grace in the image. So there is a certain schizophrenic vibe here, but those eyes are definitely trying to push it in a dark direction.
A thought provoking image!

If this had been labeled as minimalism by a Japanese master, I would have believed it! It shows a stark beauty, with lovely textures. It is also a fine metaphor for being blocked photographically.

Interesting building and story, and the juxtaposition of the old building and modern screen is odd and adds interest. You have chosen a time when you able to balance nicely the exposure for the lights and sky and building exterior

I love these, especially the second one, which reminds me of a Chinese or Japanese landscape painting.

That's where the problem actually begins.
Whether you're taking photos or editing them, you need a certain level of quality.
It's slowly becoming a case of mutual back-slapping in this forum.

I would think that goes without saying.

Who do you think should set the criteria for the assessment of the quality and quality threshold levels when anyone is taking or editing a photo?

Hmmm . . .

A member conversing with himself. Or arguing. Or whatever.

What is it now? Dan-Kumsal or Kumsal-Dan?

Oh, dear. It's all so confusing . . .

Rich

I think Kumsal and Dan are discussing a valid and relevant point.
Yep. It's confusing and there is a lot of ground to be considered. It's why I didn't want to rush into statements in the piece on current C&C that I'm trying to put together (slowly.) It is too easy for them to be out of context in what needs to be a very broad range discussion.
Meanwhile, here is Mike Johnston sharing some relevant thoughts this morning. He starts from a similar point to my present starting point - the nature of an image, the fixing of an image and its relationship to objective reality. I put this link aside to include in the piece I'm writing but it is timely to share it now. For those who don't know Mike Johnston, he has been a leading voice in photographic discussion for many decades.
theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html

The guidelines for this forum are pretty broad and always have been, at least since I started participating a dozen years ago. Just about any kind of image captured with a camera, regardless of what we did to it afterwards, has been welcome. Not everyone likes images with "creative" editing, and most are quick to say so, but they are fair game for sharing and discussion. Personally, I'm a photographic omnivore. I create and enjoy journalistic type images, but I also create and enjoy composites, texture overlays, blended exposures, digital paintings that started with photographs, and all manner of other photo-based art. Everyone is entitled to their own taste and preference, and our taste and preference does indeed impact our reviews of each other's images and is to be expected and appreciated. This thread and similar on other forums have helped me learn what appeals to other viewers (very helpful when preparing for a contest, gallery show or sales event).

As for this particular image, I suspect my edit, though imperfect, may be closer to the real scene, since to the natural eye, the sky would not have appeared featureless or gray. Lost detail is an artifact of the camera, not the scene, and in such situations I'd usually repair it rather than leave it flawed, if it was an image I had no better version of. I copied the actual sky from the reflected image, raised the luminance and reduced the saturation slightly, then knitted it into the scene. In traditional art, that generally is how we are taught to paint sky reflections in water, though with a dozen other caveats that have to do with the water's depth, surroundings, etc. So it is a close approximation. Photoshop is a remarkable toolset, and photographers have to make conscious decisions about how many of its tools they want to use, how to ethically employ them, how/whether to disclose their workflows, and that gets more complex as AI worms its way into the toolbox.

Defintely a set of discussion topics worth exploring.